This blogpost is part 1 of our masterclass on sales to help you succeed with Breakcold and beyond:

• part 2: “Nurturing leads and closing deals: the Breakcold CRM method”

• part 3: “Sales CRM automation: from 0 to pro”

Softwares used for part 1:

• Breakcold CRM (from $29/mo)

• Findymail (from $49/mo)

• Scrapybird (from $49/mo)

• Apollo.io (from $99/mo)

PS: if you liked this blogpost SHARE IT and ASK QUESTIONS in our FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/298365015683028 - The Social Selling Mafia

Enjoy!

--

Arnaud Belinga | Co-Founder @Breakcold

Let’s connect on LinkedIn!

Context: why building classic prospecting lists is not enough?

This is what happened between 2020 and 2024:

• rise of cold emailing at scale (i.e - almost like mass mailing but with good deliverability)

• rise of LinkedIn automation

Most people just shoot emails & LinkedIn automated DMs like crazy these days. It’s so easy to do it that they simply don’t think anymore. They just send thousands of emails per day and play the numbers game.

As a result, prospects are smashed with irrelevant sales pitches because people just build gigantic leads lists (1) and send hundreds of emails/messages a day (2).

How does it impact YOU and them?

👉 less visibility = harder to stand out in your prospect’s inbox

👉 more doubt = prospects don’t know if your first LinkedIn/Twitter DM is genuine or not because of automation

👉 smaller reply rate = because of audience fatigue from cold email/automated DMs

So what can you do to stand out?

🥇 Prospect segmentation

You can segment your prospecting lists to craft a better copy that will be tailored to the list. It means more campaigns but better results.

Example of niching down your prospecting list building:

B2B startups in USA - becomes 👇👉 B2B HR softwares in New York

🥇 Relevant segmentation

Here, you want to contact a prospect because he/she has manifested interest in what you’re selling by performing 1 or different kind of actions.

People also fail at sales prospecting because they address the right offer to the wrong leads, there are so many offers for so many different leads. You need to work on that first.

There are multiple ways to get leads.

👉 For cold emailing at scale: database softwares usually work great

👉 To target specific niches and create relevant prospecting lists: the use of tools that are both scrapers and email finder like Findymail are great!

Similarly, as businesses begin to explore the capabilities of quantum computing software, they stand at the cusp of revolutionizing how data is processed for creating even more targeted and hyper-qualified lead lists.

Different strategies for different type of leads

👉 if your TAM (Total Addressable Market) is low = you can’t just blast automated emails/DMs, you’ll burn your lead lists for nothing

👉 if your TAM is big = you can go crazy and use automation tools

👉 whatever the scenario, you always want to take a hyper-personalized approach with your key prospects/partnerships

I - Bucket 1 (high-ticket clients)

A°) How to find leads for high-ticket clients

Best way is to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator: why?

👉 it’s real-time data + you can filter people who are active on LinkedIn (ie. you’ll have data to play with to bond with them to start a conversation).

👉 you can adapt this strategy if your prospects are more active on Twitter/Meta etc but it will require you more research as they’re no proper databases for these platforms.

Search in Sales Nav + export using Fi

Leads list building with Findymail

B°) How to start conversations with high-ticket clients

Step 1: import the CSV file of your high-ticket clients inside Breakcold

Step 2

Using this technique will guarantee you close to a 100% acceptance rate and 100% reply rate because of the natural engagement you’ve made.

You can adapt this workflow to other social media platforms if needed.

How it looks like if you start with email 👇

You can be super productive doing this technique by focusing on each lead from the sales pipeline of Breackold👇

Social warming: interacting with someone's posts before reaching out.

Essentially, you do the opposite of what +90% of people are doing. Don’t be a monkey, get proper results by doing things that work in 2024, not in 2017.

This technique works so well that some of our paid customers created a new type of offer for their clients: a nurturing/hyper-personalized outreach offer.

C°) How I did it (video case study)

Video of how I went from cold lead to qualified sales call in less than 1 hour 👇

call booked

II - Bucket 2 (low-ticket clients)

A°) How to find leads for low-ticket clients

With low-ticket clients, you can allow yourself to use automation. You can either use the built-in part of Breakcold to send cold emails (1) or use another software to send cold emails and then push your positive replies to Breakcold CRM (2).

I personally use Smartlead for cold emailing at scale, then I use an automation to push my positive replies to Breakcold. Why do that?

👉 I don’t want to clutter my Sales CRM with thousands of unqualified leads

👉 the campaigns section of Breakcold is best used for warm emailing and for hyper-personalized cold emailing, not mass cold emailing

B°) How to start conversations with low-ticket clients

Your emails don’t need personalization (that much) - it’s really about segmenting your prospecting lists and again, addressing the right offer to the right leads.

C°) How I did it (video case study)

Video documented

If you need to learn cold emailing from scratch, read these:

• cold emailing free course (I spent 24 hours filming, writing, recording & editing this).

• cold emailing copywriting tips

III - 4 unusual performing ways to get leads & engage them

These 4 ways of getting leads are very little used and you don’t need to be a “Growth Hacker” to use them. Because of the relevant prospecting lists you’ll build, you won’t even have to use hyper-personalization in your outreach in most cases.

Summary of all workflows

A°) - What you can do with LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a gold-mine to find hyper qualified leads. You can find leads for inbound sales (1) and outbound sales (2).

1°) Getting leads for inbound sales from your LinkedIn posts

Goal: turn likers and commenters into customers

Why it works: they already engaged with you so it’s easier to start conversations

1 - Download Findymail Chrome Extension

2 - When logged in inside app.findymail.com, create your API Key

3 - Copy paste your API key in the chrome extension

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3

4 - Create a list for your inbound leads

5 - Go to one of your LinkedIn post and copy paste its URL in a new tab

6 - Export likers and/or commenters to CSV and put them in your inbound list

7 - Wait & download the CSV file

Findymail will find the valid B2B email addresses of your leads. You DON’T need to use an email verifier.

8 - Import the CSV file inside a Breakcold CRM list

Step 1: create a list and click on import CSV

Step 2: map the fields of the CSV that were not automatically reorganized

Step 3: check that the data is displayed as you want it to be and click on import

Step 4: manually say that emails are valid if Breakcold says otherwise

8 - Track the prospects to aggregate their LinkedIn posts

Step 1: select all the leads in the list imported

Step 2: click on the track leads button and start the track

9 - Start building B2B relationships with them and reach out after a few engagements

Social selling tip: you can check in the activity section of each lead how many interactions you had with them.

That way, you can see if you liked and commented their post enough in the past so when you do reach out, you guarantee yourself a 100% reply rate because they know you (1) and engaged with one of your posts in the past (2)

2°) Getting leads for outbound sales from viral LinkedIn posts

Goal: creating relevant sales outreach instead of relying on fluffy personalization

Why it works: they manifested their interest in your niche by liking/commenting something related to it

1 - install Findymail as explained from pages 4 to 6

2 - use the LinkedIn search bar to find viral posts from your 1st degree connections to 3rd degree connections

Insights: generally, it will first show you the LinkedIn posts of your 1st degree connections but the more you scroll, the more you’ll see posts from other people. You can also see directly 3rd degree connections posts sorted by most recent posts.

3 - use Findymail as explained from page 7 to 8 to export likers and followers and import the CSV file in Breakcold

4 - use Breakcold or a dedicated cold emailing software to send a cold email campaign

Step 1: create a cold email campaign & import your list

Step 2: craft your cold email copy by referring the LI post

You want to use the LinkedIn post URL in your cold email copy

Ideally, use an original subject line that is linked to both your offer and the LI post

Remember, the goal is to start a conversation, don’t sell straight away

5 - once you have positive replies, engage them using Breakcold to stay top of mind and accelerate your sales cycle

Step 1 - Mark positives replies as interested and track them to engage them using social selling

In this example, marking the lead as “interested” puts Baris automatically in a sales pipeline stage.

Step 2 - block 15/30 minutes a day to engage with interested leads before/after the sales call to accelerate your sales cycle by staying top of mind

Your goal is simple: being top of mind. For that, you’ll become the most likable service provider by building a strong B2B bond with your interested prospects. Doing this will allow you to move the leads between each sales pipeline stages much faster than usual which results in more deals closed.

B°) What you can do with Twitter

I think Twitter is highly underused. Depending on your target audience, you can build exceptional prospecting lists.

1°) targeting a niche by scraping followers

Goal: targeting your competitor’s followers and/or relevant communities

Why it works: Twitter company followers are accessible compare to LinkedIn

1 - Go to Scrapybird and create an account

2 - Go to Twitter and find a twitter account with an audience similar to yours

Explanation of the example:

Sales Hacker is a media for sales people

If you follow Sales Hacker, most likely you like sales in a B2B environment

By getting its followers and B2B email address, I can reach out to them by saying that I noticed that they follow Sales Hacker, that I’m a fan too and then I softly pitch

You can also target competitors, someone who follows Mailchimp is aware about email marketing at least a little bit, so you can take advantage of this information to come up with something.

3 - Get the twitter handle and copy paste it inside Scrapybird

4 - let Scrapybird to its magic and get the CSV file

The enrichment rate of B2B emails on Twitter is pretty low but Scrapybird will charge you only for valid B2B emails found so no problem (1) and it will make you a hyper targeted list.

5 - get your CSV file and use the data for cold emailing or hyper personalized social selling

2°) use of Twitter advanced search to find viral tweets

Goal: building a precise prospecting list using Twitter’s search engine

Why it works: compare to LinkedIn, you can define your search way more

1 - Go to Twitter search and click on advanced search

The advanced search allows you to find tweets by a certain number of likes and replies but also to impose some conditions.

2 - Type a keyword related to your business and apply a minimum of replies and comments

3 - pick a tweet that interest you and copy paste its URL in Scrapybird

4 - get your CSV file and use the data for cold emailing or hyper personalized social selling